I lost a lot of weight while weight lifting. Your diet is key! You gained 5 pounds in a month due to what you've been eating, not what you've been lifting. Some people will try to tell you that it's because you're gaining muscle but to be honest, you'd have to be on some seriously anabolic steroids to gain 5 pounds of muscle in a month. Even the people that do it on steroids do it because they can eat you out of house and home!

How are you lifting? What kinda of schedule? do you warm up with cardio? you can try to do cardio lifting...lifting lower weights, and no rest in between...go from exercise to exercise to failure... this will blow up your cardio...and is what helped me break plateaus.

First off let me say this. There is a saying, "You can't out train a bad diet." This means if you don't get your diet into shape it will be hard to change your body shape.

I'm a marathon runner and I do weight lifting. Long distance running does burn a lot of calories but for me the fastest way to lose weight and I'm talking about even the stubborn last 10-15 lbs is with resistance training. But it has to be a specific type. If you look into P90X and Insanity they base these workouts on certain principles. Interval training, muscle confusion, and excess post-exercise oxygen consumption or EPOC. If nothing else you should look up EPOC. You can design a workout based on these principals and achieve great results.

Put together a three day full body workout, excluding core exercises. I would recommend some type of split workout. To begin I would suggest about 5 exercises per daily workout with 4 sets per exercise. If you do an active stretching routine before your weight lifting session then you can reduce this to 3 sets. I don't like doing stretching before my workout so my first set is my warm up set and I use either no weight or very low weight. Do 12 reps for your first set. Rest 45-60 secs between each set. The 2nd set should be a higher weight at moderate effort. Do 10 reps for your 2nd set. Again your third set should be a higher weight at maximum effort to get out 8 reps. You should not be able to do a 9th rep. Your 4th set can be at a higher weight or same weight and just do as many as you can till failure. Rest about 2 mins before your next exercise. This workout should take about 45 mins.

After this workout you should do some type of traditional cardio using High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). For the interval cardio you will have a warm up period of 2-3 mins and then you will cycle doing high intensity for 30 or more secs with a rest phase of low intensity for about double the time of your high intensity time. You will go through this cycle 6-10 times and then have a cool down period. So if using a treadmill you could walk or jog for about 2-3 mins. Then you would repeatedly sprint for 30 secs followed by walking/jogging for 1 min for 6 to 10 intervals. Then you would walk/jog for another 2-3 mins.

Or instead of this, or in addition to this, you can put together a set of exercises that you rotate through doing as many as you can in a given amount of time with a set break between exercises. For example you can do the following exercises: mountain climbers, side to side push-ups, jump lunges, and burpees. You do as many reps for each exercise for 20/30 secs followed by 10/15 sec rest before going into the next exercise. Cycle through the entire group 2-4 times or until 4 mins are up.

One non-workout day should be devoted to stretching and one non-workout day should be devoted to core exercises.

This is just one way to devise such a workout. But something like this in my experience is very effective.

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The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible. -- Arthur C. Clarke

I haven't made any significant cuts in my diet but I, at least thought I had cut back on calories. The scale tells me I clearly have not been. As far as calorie reduction what should I shoot for. At this point, I would like to focus more on building muscle than losing weight. (The goal is to get back to my high school strength) and then begin a maintenance lifting schedule with a heavier cardio regime. In the meantime though, I would (obviously) prefer to lose some weight. Are muscle building and weight loss irreconciable? What should I aim for in regards to calorie restriction?

Ellaspop,

I try to go nightly as my muscles allow, trading between Back/Biceps, Chest/Triceps, and legs (still don't really know where to work in shoulders). I target each group and then hammer them with different variations of excerises (ie seated row, dumbell row, standing row, high row). It's been an incredibly painful month but I'm already noticing differences in strength and muscle growth. More towards what you said, I do take breaks between sets but I try to increase the weight each time and go to exhaustion each time. By the end of the night I like to be struggling with light weights.

Yauncin,

I did try interval training on a treadmill however the treadmill couldn't exactly handle it. Something about the change of speeds and what I presume was my weight was a little too much them. I did try the total body three times a week routine but I found that strength gains were slow and I wasn't losing weight very fast. (That time around I was pretty strict with calorie restriction).

I haven't made any significant cuts in my diet but I, at least thought I had cut back on calories. The scale tells me I clearly have not been. As far as calorie reduction what should I shoot for. At this point, I would like to focus more on building muscle than losing weight. (The goal is to get back to my high school strength) and then begin a maintenance lifting schedule with a heavier cardio regime. In the meantime though, I would (obviously) prefer to lose some weight. Are muscle building and weight loss irreconciable? What should I aim for in regards to calorie restriction?

IMO, it's very obtainable. However, the closer you get to your goal weight the more difficult/near impossible it gets. Look at my progress pics, from 210-170's I lost weight and built muscle/strength. It was probably more strength building than muscle building. I think I gained SOME muscle but it APPEARED that I gained more as I started stripping some excess fat away. Once I got below 170 it was more weight loss than anything.

Rage;
You could add Shoulders to either your back/bicep or chest/tricep days. I split my 3 workouts into Back/Chest, Arms/Shoulders (includes bicep and triceps), and Legs. You can look at some of my entries in the 'Did you exercise today' thread in the exercise section for my specific exercises. You might try the elliptical for HIIT. It is more like riding a bike where you control the speed by your effort instead of having to constantly adjust the speed of the machine by pushing buttons.

Yauncin;
I am a big believe in HIIT also. I had read a study that found the best split was 1:2 of High Intensity to Low Intensity. I currently do 20 seconds of sprint with 40 seconds of jog on the elliptical for the 1:2 ratio.

Although I do cardio kickboxing about 3-4X a week, I only do it for about half an hour, but I too have chosen to lift as my primary workout for losing weight. One of the reasons is that unlike cardio which only burns calories while you're doing it, weightlifting can actually continue to burn calories for about a day and half (36-38 hours) after you stop. SO for someone as busy as I am, it's good to know that I'm continuing to burn those cal's while I'm working on something else.